Subject: Re: NNCP at scale report

From: Sergey Matveev <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2021 17:17:45 +0300

Greetings!

*** John Goerzen [2021-01-01 21:09]:
>I thought I would summarize how this is working for me!

Thanks for sharing your interesting experience! I have got much lower
amounts of data transferred (but still many gigabytes) and less nodes.
All email is passing through NNCP for many years. "chunked" transfers is
done very often. But do not remember when I used nncp-bundle the last
time (but I like that creation :-))

>- One of the machines is the spooler.  I want to use the same code  as
>everything else, so I use nncp-file to send to self.  Unfortunately nncp-toss
>doesn't see that.  The workaround is to  call nncp-xfer /var/spool/nncptmp
>twice.  It moves the files out  of tx, then into rx, and then it works :-)

Or you can just "mv path/to/self/tx/* path/to/self/rx/".

>- There are scenarios in which it may be helpful to redirect  packets.

Technically this is possible: just wrap the existing packet to
transition wrapper and encrypt it. But current tools do not do that.
Think this is small niche, but it is not hard to to.

Also there is ability to override "via" via "-via" command line option,
ignoring hard-coded configuration. But of course it is done only for
newly created packets.

>- I wonder if it might be nice to have a nncp-maint - it could  rotate the
>log file, run some checks for very old packets,  remove old .seen files, etc.
>This can all be done with  conventional tools for those familiar with Unix
>administration,  but not everyone is.

Well, I think that it is preferrable people to learn more of Unix
administration, because it will bring much more benefit. When I have
added chunked transfer, that can be done manually with split+nncp-file
and somehow metainformation transfer -- it will reduce requirements for
temporary files or by burden of using dd with some kind of seeks. So it
was not so Unixy way, but very convenient. But adding completely the
same and similar kind of log-rotation utility, that already exists out
of box in every distribution... I do not see any benefits. I am sure
that every Unix user have to know how to rotate his logfiles. In
newsyslog it is just single line for NNCP log files rotation. If
nncp-maint will rotate the files, then anywat it will be completely the
same thing that you will have to learn how to configure and use. The
same applies to .seen packets removing, that is just single "find -delete"
call.

Of course it is hard to draw a line between that kind of decisions. For
example some time ago I wrote goredo (http://www.goredo.cypherpunks.ru/)
that has exactly that kind of command: removing temporary files,
captured logs and states. But, in goredo it can not be done easily with
single simple "find" invocation, because there are various different
files. All of them can be replaced with shell scripts (with "find"
commands), but goredo aims to be the single binary for convenience.
Moreover, goredo is a tool actively used interactively and temporary
files removing is not done as a cron-job. So in that case it is better
to create that kind of maintenance utility.

But NNCP has only single log file. Cleaning up is done with relatively
new nncp-rm utility, that can remove .seen files. Seems that adding
-anewer kind of "find" options will be useful however. Will look at this.

-- 
Sergey Matveev (http://www.stargrave.org/)
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